Why Are Newspapers Dying?

Recently, the venerable Chicago Tribune
was able to splash the story across its masthead about how native-son
Barack Obama had just won the US Presidential Election. Yet only a
few weeks later, the Tribune was itself the news story, as Tribune
Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Cubs, the Orlando
(FL) Sentinel and Hartford (CT) Courant, sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy
protection from creditors.

As with many newspapers, there are a
number of reasons that this year has been one of the hardest for the
Tribune. The most obvious was the deal that owner Sam Zell had
arranged in 2007 to acquire the company in the first place,
essentially using the company itself as collateral for the purchase
of the company, which he managed to do with a $300 million dollar
margin to purchase what was then an $8.5 billion dollar company.

Doing so, however, meant that the
company had to generate roughly $500 million in revenues each quarter
in order to pay off that debt, and the rapidly disintegrating
advertising market caused revenues in the last two quarters to fall
off a cliff, and even selling off smaller holdings has failed to
satisfy the payments. In the bankruptcy hearing, the Tribune
announced that they had only $7.6 billion dollars in assets while
holding more than $13 billion in debt.

Reports of My Demise ...

Beyond the obvious factor of a badly
engineered business deal that couldn't stand the hurricane force
winds of the current economic meltdown, there is a more troublesome
underlying story ... newspapers themselves are dying. This is not in
and of itself news - the decline and ultimately the demise of
newspapers has been an ongoing theme since the emergence of the
radio, and while readership has been declining steadily for nearly
the last century, newspapers themselves have always seemed to
reinvent themselves at the last minute.

With the advent of radio, newpapers
differentiated themselves by providing many more channels of
potential information, and providing that information at far greater
depth than most radio shows could. Television news proved more
competitive in some respects - the novelty of seeing the news
unfold before the viewer made TV especially attractive for visceral
"stories", but overall, the newspaper has managed to
maintain a broader appeal for those things which couldn't readily be
broadcast - it's difficult and not terribly cost effective to
broadcast a want ad, for instance.

The emergence of the Internet proved
newspapers' most challenging competitor, and the one that ultimately
may have managed to do the newspaper industry in altogether. Most
newspapers, from the veritable New York times on down, launched their
own websites, reasoning that this was simply another medium in which
to publish their own writers, but this viewpoint may have been
somewhat shortsighted.

In 2003, the term blog
first entered into the modern lexicon, an online editorial or journal
written not by professional journalists but by eager amateurs who
could publish by overcoming a far smaller barrier to entry -
setting up a blogging site. With contemporary tools, the blogger
could effectively start producing his or her own "news"
within a few hours, and if they happened to be reasonably competent,
were willing to invest some time into promotion and consistent in
publishing content, they had a good chance to gain more "eyeballs"
than professional journalists with thirty years of experience.

As of
April, 2008, only three newspapers had a subscriber base in excess of
1,000,000 readers - USA Today (2.3 million), The Wall Street
Journal (2.1 million) and the New York Times (1.1 million). Most
newspapers average approximately 300,000 subscribers. This of course
doesn't reflect total readership numbers - many papers sell a
significant proportion of their subscriber levels in newsstand and
library sales - but it does provide at least a basic metric for
understanding the dynamics of newspaper publishing vs. the web.

Blogging guru Robert Scoble
compiled a list in 2007 of
Google Reader subscribers for a number of newspapers, individual bloggers, and online news providers. Keep in mind that these rates reflected the number of RSS
feeds that were read through Google Reader, which represents perhaps
five percent of the total news-feed consumers. Using that as a (very
rough guide), organizations such as Tech Crunch had around 130,000
subscribers from this source alone, which equates to perhaps 2.5
million readers online either from direct site visitors, or
increasingly due to RSS links. The New York Times, by comparison, had
perhaps 40,000 such Google Reader subscribers (maybe 800,000 total
readership). Significantly, Scoble himself had about 5,000 individual
Google Reader subscribers.

Put another way, organizations such as
O'Reilly Media, Tech Crunch, the Huffington Post, or even individuals such as Robert
Scoble are able to capture comparable or greater audiences than
organizations such as the New York Times - and are usually able to
do it at tenths of pennies to the dollar in comparison to the Times.

The Debt Trap

Subscribers do not, in general, provide
a huge revenue base for newspapers. This has been true since well
before the time of the Internet. What subscribers do provide is a
reasonably accurate portrait of what the typical demographic of the
total readership looks like - are they affluent or bargain
basement, are they likely to have children at home, do they conform
to a particular ethnic group, and so on. The subscriber number also
provides a rough guess as to the overall size of these demographics
... all of which are of course of interest to advertisers and
marketers.

Those eyeballs represent revenue for
advertisers - what's the best ad buy for a given market, how can
you target your advertising so that it will appeal most closely to a
targeted readership. Search engine optimization (SEO) sounds like a
technical discipline, but it is in fact far more of a marketing
phenomenon - how do you develop searches in order to make site X
the most likely to come up in search engines when searches are typed
in by the people the marketers are most likely trying to attract. It
is similar to the kind of marketing analysis that ad buyers make when
attempting to penetrate newspaper readerships ... but it also
competes directly with those newspapers for revenue from an
advertiser. (It's worth noting that many direct marketing companies
have either morphed into or established SEO departments).

When times are good, companies are
generally able to pour more money into advertising. Keep in mind that
advertising is an expense, however - you need to spend the ad money
in order to gain returns, and if you aren't generating sufficient
returns then either your advertising is not effective or the venue is
insufficient (it's also possible that the product is just no good,
but in reality that's never been a big factor in ad expenditures).
When times are tough, those same advertisers will start cutting out
those markets that are providing only marginal rates of return or
worse and concentrate increasingly on those markets which generate
the most profit.

A newspaper publisher has a product -
a newspaper or magazine. That product needs to be printed on
newsprint or gloss paper, both of which are becoming increasingly
dear as anyone who's bought paper recently can tell you. The product
needs to be distributed, which costs gasoline and airline fuel, and
needs to be mailed (which has also becoming increasingly
prohibitive). These operational costs aren't going away anytime soon,
but they are also only a part of the picture.

The Tribune deal is an example of the
broader conglomeration of papers. There are comparatively few
independent newspapers anymore. In the United States, a significant
number of regional market papers were purchased by a handful of
consortia - Murdoch's News Corp., Gannett, McClatchy Company,
Hollinger International, and a few others. In most cases, these
independent papers were purchased both to expand the reach of the
given consortium into a given market, but typically the papers
purchased were those that were already struggling with costs given
the economy of scale of production.

As these consortia grew, they did so by
taking on debt to acquire the new papers (in many cases by leveraging
the company itself as collateral for that debt). In general, because
of the diversity of papers purchased, servicing this debt usually
involved making sure that you had two or three top tier papers that
were able to subsidize the cost of the second tier papers, then
letting local economic conditions contribute as possible.

Unfortunately as the credit crisis
continues to expand globally, it places a number of these consortia
into the same position as the Tribune - they are faced with
declining revenues in all markets simultaneously, and suddenly once
feasible debt payments are becoming increasingly onerous. Typically,
the only real response that a given consortium can take is to reduce
staff at the paper (which causes readership to decline as quality of
the product declines) or in many cases to close the paper itself.

The New York Times may be in a similar
position, at this stage. CNN Money
reported recently that the Times now has net negative revenue (it's losing money). As a
consequence, it has repeatedly trimmed staff, including its IT staff.
This ironically means that the online sites of newspapers may
actually be cut even though locally they are revenue positive,
primarily because the costs of maintaining the IT infrastructure is
still a net negative.

As prestige papers like the Times move
into this spiral of declining quality and fewer stories, this is also
having the impact of making it harder for these companies to
effectively leverage their brand online, at a time when the online
news space itself is just really beginning to solidify into distinct
brand names - and those brand names are increasingly tied into
individuals rather than corporate identities.

The Changing Face of Advertising

Advertising, additionally, is changing
dramatically. General Motors, forced to make an ignominious trip to
Washington to ask for a bailout (with Ford and Chrysler on their
heels), has cut most of its ad buys for the Superbowl and has
significantly scaled back its advertising overall as car and truck
sales plummet. This is happening with most sectors, right now, and
advertising agencies and marketing firms are, as a consequence, also
going under in record numbers.

This has had a particularly negative
influence on the publishing industry, because for the most part these
advertising agencies were geared very specifically to mesh with the
publishers - ad buys were typically done primarily with a focus on
targeting newspaper and magazine advertising first, especially for
items that were not cost effective to market via television
advertisements. With the ad agencies either no longer there or
receiving far fewer such contracts, they are not making the ad buys
from these channels.

This is even bleaker for publishers
long term. When the economy finally does recover, new advertising
companies will be the first companies to emerge from the doldrums.
However, these companies will be filled (if history is any
indication) by bright, eager twenty-somethings far more experienced
with Facebook, Google, iPhones, YouTube and Twitter than with
newspaper or magazine advertising, and they will be far more likely
to think in those terms not only in the production of new advertising
media, but also in pushing specific sales channels over others. As
most newpapers can be thought of as advertising vehicles with a thin
layer of editorial laid over the top, the consequences of this will
be devastating.

Another advertising trend that will
prove deleterious to newspapers is the increasing focus by companies
in creating cohesive internal "worlds" in which they are
able to sell just their own products without having to worry about
competition. Such worlds shouldn't be confused with virtual reality
worlds (though these will be one such vehicle). Rather, what's
involved is the creation of branded widgets, of comprehensive catalog
sites that include editorial as well as interactive content, and of
cross media campaigns in which each particular medium expression has
a complement in other media (a series of YouTube videos that tie into
forums or Flash games, with downloadable widgets and themes). These,
unfortunately, do not generally work well with newspaper content -
and as a consequence the ad buys in that space will represent a small
percentage of the overall ad budget.

The Decentralization of Journalism

Perhaps the final challenge facing
newspapers (and to a lesser extent magazines) comes from the
declining authoritativeness of the newspaper as the arbiter of what
is editorial content - in essence, what is news. Advertisers were
originally attracted to newspapers because newspapers presented
novel, interesting information about the world around the reader, and
what's more, because the cost of publishing was so high (and the
readership so broad, comparatively speaking) some pain was taken to
insure the accuracy of this news. This was compelling to the reader,
and as such, it represented for the advertiser a venue in which to
also gain a certain degree of legitimacy.

New information technologies has
expanded the effective universe of the reader, and has also made the
world far more immediate. Radio then television served to bring
distant frontiers much closer to home, and this in turn has meant
that the cost of providing relevant news has also exploded ...
especially since news organizations tended to remain centralized for
much of their existence - syndication existed, but such syndicates
in and of themselves became news organizations that effectively
controlled the content provided to other news media (effectively the
news syndicates became competitors as much as providers to the
newspapers over all).

With the Internet, however, most of
these equations have been rewritten, with the new language the
language of decentralization. Google, as an aggregator of content,
became the table of contents for the new media, while Wikipedia
became its fact checking archive. Bloggers became its reporters, and
as such they are increasingly able to beat the "professional"
journalists to "the story" because such bloggers were local
to where the story was. Moreover, such bloggers could often
disseminate queries to others within their networks within minutes of
a contentious story being published, a fact that was displayed
constantly throughout the 2008 political campaign.

These bloggers may not necessarily be
"journalists" in the same sense that a newspaper or
magazine reporter is, though this more reflects the bias of these
same reporters than it does any real grounding in professionalism or
ethics. The blogosphere is developing its own sense of ethics
concerning what journalism is and isn't, one that's different but no
less legitimate in its approach (and the blogosphere is generally
brutal to those who do not get their facts straight, something which
most print journalists have long not had to worry much about beyond
the level of theoretical exercise).

It should also be noted that in 2008,
for the first time, more
online journalists were imprisoned last year than print journalists
were, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as
reported by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
University. In 2008, 48% of all journalists that were imprisoned by
censoring governments were online journalists ... bloggers, for the
most part ... while 45% were print journalists. This is an important
metric - one of the roles of the press should be to provide a
spotlight on the inner workings of both governments and corporations,
and the fact that bloggers are now doing this more than their print
colleagues (and as a consequence, are being seen increasingly by such
organizations as being "dangerous" enough to jail) gives to
bloggers a degree of legitimacy that is difficult to argue with.

In the short term, its likely that this
will improve journalism overall, which has for some time been fairly
heavily intimidated by those same governments and corporations. In
the longer term, however, it is likely that most print journalists
will also become proficient as online journalists, and as such will
continue to erode the authority of print publications.

Yet this points to an important
(perhaps critical) distinction. While newspapers are likely on their
way to the recycle bin, editorial journalism isn't. We are moving to
an era where journalistic integrity and personal prestige of the
individual journalist is becoming more important than the prestige of
the newspaper or other media that the journalist writes for.
Journalism is becoming decentralized, and there are many indications
that this is, just perhaps, a good thing.

Kurt
Cagle is an author, programmer and yes, journalist, working as an
editor for O'Reilly Media. Feel free to subscribe to his newsfeed
or twitter feed.

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15 Comments

Robert Scoble is your tech... unless he has another geeky brother named Jeff?

I hate to point out the obvious, but it's pretty much time for Newspapers to charge folks to read them online. Even though I'd hate to have to pay for it now, I'd do it. I read the NYTimes and my local paper online daily for free(as most of my neighbors do)... and it doesn't seem fair. The revenue needs to come from somewhere. People want to feel connected to the Times and their local papers. If they are forced to pay for them, I think they will keep reading online. It could also be done as a .99 cent fee per article you want to read, just like an iTunes download.

Unfortunately that won't save them. Most of the newspapers originally tried charging for online editions. This didn't work out so well as people just went elsewhere on the Internet to find news rather than pay.

Since then they opened up their sites for free but sell additional adds on the articles to make money instead. I seem to recall reading that this turned out to be more profitable. With the rise of bloggers if they tried switching back odds are nobody would be pay and they would be in an even worse position as their readers would have left.

One of the dangers of being an editor as well as a writer is that when you submit your OWN story at 1am there's no one to do a quick edit to insure you don't do something like refer to Jeff Scoble rather than Robert Scoble. Thanks for picking that up (the reference in the article itself has been changed).

As to your comment, I wish it were that simple (really! - it'd be nice to get a buck a pop for every view of my article). Paid content, a la the iTunes model, just doesn't work very well in the print world. The problem is that few monetization models do.

I'm working on an article about the devastating impact of the Internet on most creative professions, and while there are a number of advantages that come with it, the fact remains that the Internet has not been any kinder to publishing than it has to any other media production, though in some respects I think that the Internet has probably forever changed the underlying economic models of the society overall, and publishing just happens to be one of the first to see the consequences of that change.

Blogging to me is a transitional stage right now, one where people are throwing out the old models and struggling to come up with the new ones. Like all transitional models, the question of value is always one of the hardest to negotiate, because value is ultimately psychological in nature - we pay, overall for that which we value most, so the question ultimately comes down to who benefits most in a blogger writing.

What I've seen emerging is that blogging really falls into several distinct categories:

1) Newsletter/Analysis. The blogger in this case is dispensing advice or providing an analysis of a particular domain. For instance, financial bloggers write about market conditions, about trends and so forth. In this case, the blogger is selling either themselves or the analyst firm for which they work - giving you enough of a feel for his or her advice to make people willing to fork over considerable money for more specialized advice.

2) Journalists. These bloggers are in fact the most direct analog to the print journalists - they report on the facts on the ground, they are typically syndicated with one or more services, and they usually specialize in factual reporting rather than editorializing. News still needs to be written, and many news organizations now spend a great deal of time watching the blogosphere to pick up these people, and then usually pay either on a per article or salaried rate.

3) Product critics. These are people who spend time reviewing software, hardware, consumer goods, or what have you and write extensively about them. Like most critics, the more popular ones are either paid (or sponsored) by an organization that wants to gain the clout of being seen to be associated with this critic, or they are paid in goods and services (or both).

4) Political commentators. These are bloggers who concentate on political analysis, typically from one or the other end of the political spectrum. They are typically paid by think tanks or political organizations.

5) Celebrity Bloggers. These are people who have become famous either by doing something else first or by playing the media game very effectively. For them, blogging is a means to an end, part of a general marketing campaign.

6) Corporate/Governmental Bloggers. These are people that effectively communicate what their company, group, or agency are doing. While they may be public relations people, they may also be engineers, executives or managers within the organization that see blogging as part of their overall responsibility.

7) Creative Professionals. Authors, photographers, artists or others who view blogging as a way of communicating with their audience or potential market. Few authors actually publish longer works by blog (the medium just doesn't lend itself well to that, to be honest, as an author who's occasionally tried to blog stories) but this is a way for authors to build suspense for upcoming books.

8) Technical Professionals. Similarly, a lot of programmers tend to blog in order to promote technical ideas, explore new concepts and not necessarily coincidentally make themselves more salable as consultants or when they go into their next gig.

In other words, bloggers are for the most part just writers that in a different day and age may have been journalists, may have written in technical journals, may have corresponded via (real) mailing lists, or may have been public relations or marketing types.

It's also worth noting that there are comparatively few areas of writing, regardless of whether the writing is done on or off-line, where the reader pays the writer directly. Magazines paid writers in order to keep their offerings novel and attractive, but made that money back several fold in advertising revenue. Book publishers typically paid an advance on royalties, but the purchasers of those books were seldom readers directly - they were book sellers.

Overall, I don't see this changing all this much, save that I think that the market for writers to go directly to the reader is expanding pretty dramatically (as the growth of the self-published book market indicates). Some of the venues may change - I think that the traditional newspaper model is probably one that will eventually fail because of both bad business decisions and rising resource costs - but the need for this type of writing hasn't changed, and is in fact increasing.

There's one last point in this overly long comment that I did want to make. There was a huge influx of bloggers in the 2002-2006 time frame, but the vast majority of them kept a personal blog that they maintained for perhaps a few months before they decided that blogging was simply too much work.

For the most part, professional bloggers are like any other professional - they maintain a consistent pattern of publishing regularly, have good writing skills and are effective communicators, are able to write across a fairly broad range of topics, and are often better at analysis than is the norm. In other words, they apply professional standards of ethics and commitment to their blogging, and not surprisingly they reap the benefits from that.

Most people I know read blog sites, newspaper sites and yet still buy a newspaper. Every morning I get on a train full of commuters all holding a newspaper. My street has two or three paper boys delivering newspapers. There are bad businesses and there are good businesses; the industry, however, is in great shape.

I've read a lot of articles like this in the past, yet I fail to see the source of optimism all of the authors seem to have. Maybe that's because I don't identify myself as a part of this new "blogging" movement, despite writing articles for online publications. Too many things are routinely overlooked.

Problem #1. Nobody draws any real distinction between blogs and other forms of online publishing. By extension, all online sources are represented as equal until proven otherwise. All online sources are represented as equal to mass media, until proven otherwise.

Problem #2. Looking at #1 from a different angle, the popular definition of "blog" covers pretty much any website with regular content updates. But most of those don't have anything to do with journalism. There is a huge number of personal blogs, which are more like online diaries than online newspapers. People who write about media usually don't draw any distinction between those and other types of online publications.

Problem #3. Praising decentralization, better speeds and higher quantities of news, people completely ignore the problem of information overflow. It _is_ a problem. One of the valuable things about newspapers is the assumption that they report all the important news of a certain kind, and none of the unimportant news. The assumption is not always true, but when it is, the feature is incredibly valuable.

Most of the blogs don't strive to provide either complete or noise-filtered coverage. Searching all the relevant news becomes the job of the reader. Filtering all the irrelevant news becomes the job of the reader as well. I think it's fairly obvious that aggregator websites don't solve this problem.

Problem #4. It's true that newspapers lost a lot of credibility. The problem is, blogs _in general_ don't have any more credibility than newspapers. They are faster, cheaper, easier to consume. They might have a better business model. But they are not more credible or authoritative.

Problem #5. Editorial control discrepancy. Editors of online publications, who do real editing, are often seen as redundant and harmful. "Moderators" of all sorts (e.g. on Wikipedia), who usually bear less responsibility and provide much less positive input, are seen as necessary and useful. This partially leads to the problem #3 above, since "moderators" are usually disassociated from the content. They are not responsible for content, but responsible for keeping the system in working order, whichever order that is.

Etcetra.

I see a lot of articles that cheer at the demise of (traditional) mass media, but all of the ones I've read so far overlooked these and many other problems with the thing they declare as its heir. There is also way too much fuzziness in the terminology used.

PS: It's really difficult to draw a difference between between problems the online media itself and problems with the way it is represented in various articles.

When I say "the thing they declare as its heir" there is an implication that there is one such thing. I guess I should have written "the image of the online media, as shown in the online media" instead.

#1 and #2. Check out my comment in response to who are blogging "profitably" above. The term blog itself has become kind of a generic term that describes a fairly broad host of different types of writing, largely because they use similar platforms. This is a lot like saying that a technical computer book on complex database systems is like "Gone with the Wind" because they both happen to be published books.

The news media tends to use it more narrowly, describing what amounts to an online editorial or commentary, and I'm using their particular usage. News itself doesn't lend itself well to this form of blogging - one assumes a first person personal narrative structure, the other assumes a third personal impersonal narrative structure, among a number of other issues.

I suspect that where the real distinction lies is the question between online and print content, which encompasses both blogs and blews (blog-based news content).

#3. Decentralization. I'm not praising decentralization so much as anticipating it. In a centralized, heirarchical news distribution system, imposing an editorial structure on information is relatively easy. IN a decentralized, network oriented news distribution system, that editorial structure gets lost, because different people have different narratives and editorial classifications.

Overall, I believe that we're in a transitional period - we no longer have the structure associated with the editorial regime but we haven't yet developed either a systemic and standardized taxonomy or a mechanism for mapping between taxonomies that can be maintained over a large enough information set. There are some interesting things emerging in the Semantic Web space that indicate that this may change relatively soon, but right now, the only effective editorial vision is Google ratings, Digg reviews and the like.

#4. You're exactly correct there - blogs in general have no more credibility, and in many cases, have far less, than most newspapers. However, on an individual basis, there are many blogs (in either the broad or restrictive sense) that have a higher credibility than many papers. I don't see that changing.

#5. I think that the question here is what precisely the role of an editor should be. I'm an editor (for O'Reilly Media). I write as many as a dozen articles a month, I coordinate a group of about 120 writers, I set editorial standards and very occasionally will lower the boom on someone who doesn't meet those standards, I hire new writers.

Each of these actions influences the editorial direction of O'Reilly Broadcast as seen from the outside. Ironically, one of the things that I generally don't do is tell a writer what to write or how to write it, beyond occasional broad editorial recommendations, and I almost never actually copyedit work, unless I'm dealing with a new writer that isn't familiar with the O'Reilly style.

I don't think that really changes that much from the online world to the offline. In a typical newspaper publication, its rare for the editor to actually assign a story any more. Far more likely, the journalist follows a story, then if it looks like there's something worth following, they pitch it to the editor, who then either redlights or greenlights it - and it's rare to redlight a story unless it really runs counter to the overall editorial vision of the organization.

Magazines are a little different, but not significantly so. When I worked as a magazine editor, I spent far more time trying to find good writers than I did in rejecting bad stories out of hand from the writers I did have.

Thus, I think that this idea that newspapers are more editorial biased than online content is largely a myth. 75% of all editorial content in most papers comes off the wire - it may be reworked by a local writer, but it usually starts life as a news story from a syndicate or a press release from a company.

Final point. There is always something of a tautological problem when the media starts examining itself, and I don't think that changes whether the medium is paper or bits.

Newspaper columnists are no doubt paid by a corporation to write, discrediting them in today's "I want it now the way I want it" society. Seriously, who wants to be told what to read these days, and you read it at 6am??? We want the news how we want it when we want it, hell, by whom we want to read it from.

If the large daily news publications were smart they would do the opposite of what they are currently doing. Instead of making a broad and national product and turning into an ADVO, ie. http://www.valassislists.com/, type company (an advertising vehicle for all with total market coverage) like the media sources that have taken over their market share, "digress" a bit and go back to the niche once had, and once again become a robust local news source for their immediate community...while evolving with the technology at hand...I believe they could regain status.

You've made a common mistake, in assuming that a newspaper's "product" is its newpaper. A newspaper's "product," is it's advertising space, and it's customers are not its subscribers, but its advertisers.

This is why newspapers should have never entered the internet arena, at all. They sacrificed what they did well -- publish a printed media at a premium cost to advertisers, and a premium profit to themselves -- for something that they don't do well at all -- publish a digital media, at a huge discount to advertisers, and a very small profit to themselves.

If newspapers would have ignored the internet from the start, and refused to allow their very expensive to produce content to be given away free on the web, and forced those who wanted that content to continue to receive it in the printed form, then they would be in much better shape than they are today.

The new media, then having to fund and produce its own content, would have been forced to raise its fees to advertisers, or forgo altogether attempting to compete with the printed media.

I've worked for both newspapers and magazines over the years, and know full well what the primary product of such publications are (as an editor, its sometimes humbling to realize that your editorial content exists primarily as the filler between advertisements).

Had newspapers ignored the Internet, this article would have been written three years ago. In general classifieds have already migrated to the Internet, and what I see is that for many newspapers, full page and half page ads are being taken up by smaller and smaller buyers or are being given over to more editorial content, indicating to me that demand for advertising (and hence, what can be charged for that advertising) is drying up.

Moving online has helped many newspapers recapture some of that, but even there the chase for advertising dollars is fierce and going to get fiercer. The editorial content is still the draw, even online, but there are few editors right now who are not watching uneasily as the economy tips into full tilt mode.